In the Journey of You becoming You. You may or not be aware of the rules
Rules for Being Human
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial & error and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works”.
4. A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain it’s lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will, again, look better than “here”.
7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look , listen, and trust.
Do you have a voice in your head telling you stuff?
Is the stuff it tells you always helpful?
If you answered yes to the first question and no to the second question then read on.
This phenomenon has one or two descriptions, the voice in your head, your inner critic, as my colleague Debbie calls it, ‘The Crow’, The Gremlin (and others). This last description is used by Rick Carson in his book Taming Your Gremlin.
Rick talks about, that we are not our beliefs, we are not our thoughts.
Actually as this picture implies, perhaps our thoughts are not facts, just maybe, they are not actual facts.
How can that be?
Because they are internal representations of ‘facts’, that we each create and build, from what we perceive of reality, through our ‘lenses’, our(beliefs).
This all means of course when we hear that voice, that Gremlin, telling us stuff, we believe her/him/it! Then we act upon what is said, quite often to our own or other’s detriment.
What to do?
Have a look at Rick’s video
Rick talks about the life force within you and how the ‘Gremlin’ interferes with your experience.
I like these:-
You do not live life, life lives you.
Life is the dancer, you are the dance, what kind of dance are you?
Let’s use a technique here to get at who’s in charge:-
Think of a ‘recent conversation’ with your Gremlin, have it run in your head, you don’t need to say anything out loud. As you run it, do these things:-
Locate the voice, where specifically is it? At the back of your head? To one side? Above? Etc?
Who’s voice is it? Your mother’s? Your father’s? Your brother’s / sister’s? Yours? A voice from a scary movie? Someone else’s, No idea?
Repeat the conversation once more, as it normally runs.
Now run again, this time make the voice very, very quiet, a tiny whisper
Again, this time,turn the volume way up, it is screaming very, very, loud, Rock Concert Amp LOUD!
This time, normal volume, but it is speaking very slowly, veeerryy slloowwlly.
Now, same conversation, speed it up, very, very, fast, Mickey Mouse fast,
Then answer this question. Who is in charge, You or the voice?
From my Twitter tag line:- If you permit your thoughts to have control, guess what? You lost control!. Ask, what are my thoughts about this? Observe them, don’t be carried away by them.
What have you learned about yourself in reading this BLOG entry?
How will you now begin to be, in relationship to that inner Gremlin?
How will you now be learning to deal with the dialogues?
Why am I asking the question about who is the Master; You or your Mind?
Because it is important. Our brain is absolutely amazing at learning, think of all the patterns laid down in a lifetime, all those things that can just be done automatically now, without consciously paying attention. Dressing, eating, washing, walking, running, riding a bike, balancing, swimming, changing gear in a car, speaking, reading, understanding language, knitting, sewing, playing an instrument, writing, etc. This is incredibly efficient and it is why the brain learns patterns, because to learn means you need to pay conscious attention and that takes energy, glucose. The brain uses about 20% of the body’s energy supply, so the more it can do without constantly paying attention the better 🙂
Beliefs and the Child Brain
So what? Well, as per the slide above, there are a lot of things the brain learns as a child, shoulds, musts, have tos, ought tos, for example that may, or may not, be helpful in later adult life. We learn beliefs about ourselves, for example “I’m not good enough! Be Perfect, Please everybody.” Of course if you hold a belief (A lens through which you perceive reality) you will always have evidence to back it up, because I am right in this belief and ‘look, see the evidence’ about me being not good enough! Hence low self esteem is perpetuated until!
Until what? Until you wake up and begin to think about this belief, to observe it. See it for what it really is:-
Something you learned
Taught to you by others
Useful at the time of learning, because it kept you safe
By doing this you begin the journey to becoming the master of your mind
“The unexamined life is not worth living” (Plato – Socrates)
At this point, just begin to notice the beliefs. I will cover how to begin a process of change in a later post called “Feel the Fear and do it anyway”
What beliefs (lenses) have you formed about yourself? (Write them down) Look at them and really think about:-
When you learned them?
Where you learned them? From whom? (Note this may not be easy to do. It is worth it)
In this post, I am introducing some more distinctions.
The founder of The Neuroleadership Institute, Dr David Rock, created a model SCARF that enables us to talk about what is going on when ‘the red mist descends’ or ‘we lose the plot’.
In my Points of View entry I introduced the concept of the triune brain. The ancient reptilian part of the brain was the first to develop and its job is to keep us from danger. Historically, in the development of our species, this part was really useful. Its Fight – Flight – Freeze mechanism driven by the Amygdala kept us alive 🙂 A thing to note here, is that this ‘process’, (referred to as the amygdala flood), will fire on a perceived threat as well as a real threat and therein lies an issue for us in today’s world.
Back to David’s Model
As you can see in the model, we perceive threat and reward in the five domains, Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness
How can we use this model then to help us? Well it is David’s view that we scan the SCARF domains five times per second , so we have about a fifth of a second (enough) to catch what triggered. 🙂
SCARF PRE Model
In my experience, the above is very helpful, Name it, Claim it, Tame it
An example:- I am driving down the M40 towards London and wish to join the M25. There is a queue!
I have a couple of options and I do both 🙂 :- join the end of the queue or go further along and ‘cut in’.
If I join the end of the queue and somebody else ‘cuts in’ guess what? Yep ‘Red Mist’, my wife Gill can testify to this 🙂
(Do you think this is a real or perceived threat by the way? )
Anyway, using Name it, Claim it, Tame it, I have my 1/5th of a second to name what just triggered me. Status/ Fairness, in this scenario.
Internally then, I say to myself, “There goes my Status trigger” and do you know, its like my brain says “Ah, you know about this, its not a threat then” 🙂 It works. Again, Gill notices 🙂 🙂
The really hard bit, is remembering to do it, see Gill again 🙂
If you ever wondered about ‘Road Rage’, this is what is at the beginnings of that.
Back to the slide above, SCARF PRE Model. We can use this to practice, to learn how to ‘catch the triggers’
Before a meeting / an interaction you know might be tricky in ‘Red Mist’ terms, think about which of the domains might trigger e.g. Autonomy, Status and Fairness.
Regulatory:- During the actual interaction, notice which stimuli are triggering and as above Name it, Claim it, Tame it.
Explanatory:- After the event, replay it in your mind’s eye and explain what what happened in terms of the stimuli, what they triggered in you, and whether you reacted or responded
Points of view are interesting, in that we defend them sometimes as if our life was depending on that point of view being the absolute ‘truth’.
What’s going on?
Well in the picture above, Black Beret on the left has a belief and remember the definition of a belief as (a lens through which we perceive reality) that there are Four, that’s what he believes, backed up by what he sees, the ‘evidence’. Oh and of course he has the common belief we all have, ‘I am right’. Now look at the perspective (point of view) that No Beret (his brother 🙂 ) holds. His belief, his lens, tells him there are Three and he has the ‘evidence’ to back it up and of course he has the belief ‘I am right’ also. Oh dear!
It would actually all be fine if our brains did not care about disagreement and just played “yeah whatever” and sometimes it does.
It just does not care!
And sometimes it does!
What is making the difference?
Caring.. If I am invested in the point of view and by that I mean, it is important for me, it means something to me.
There is something else however:-
When you disagree with me, my brain perceives that as an attack, a threat.
Then, what happens? I will cover this in much more detail in a future post, for now though, just be aware of how the brain developed. I will use the concept of the Triune Brain proposed by Neurologist Dr Paul Maclean, for simplicity here (you will find, not all Neurologists hold the same point of view as Paul 🙂 ) However it is useful to talk briefly about what is going on when there is disagreement.
At a simple level, the reptilian brain ‘perceives’ the disagreement as an attack, (and by the way in any situation, this part of the brain gets control first, to keep us safe). The amygdala then, get control and put the brain in fight / flight/ freeze mode. This releases Adrenalin (to prepare us for the ‘fight’) the rational brain (pre-frontal Cortex) is also shut down, so we do not have access to superior executive powers of thinking. All that is ‘running’ in the Brain is “my life is in danger – I must win this fight!!” And by the way we also cease to listen to what the others are saying, we are just listening for a gap to get our point of view articulated more! Sometimes we don’t even wait for the gap, we just talk and nobody’s listening !! That I’m sure, you have seen many times with points of view, in politics for example 🙂
Let me finish here with two points of view on a mountain, Ben Nevis in Scotland. Both are talking about the same mountain.
“Come on, let’s amble up this wee hill”
“No way, that’s an enormous challenge”
How might you work with points of view differently now?
How might you respond rather than defend or attack or both?
Would holding differing points of view perhaps be a good time to practice the Pause?
